


The Art of Losing Isn't Hard to Master

by unintentionalgenius



Series: One Art [1]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, F/M, M/M, Reincarnation, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-01-14 01:33:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1247770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unintentionalgenius/pseuds/unintentionalgenius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apparently, if you screw up badly enough the first time, the Valar give do-overs.</p>
<p>A modern Reincarnation AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Incorporates both book and movie canon. And some creative modernization.  
> Takes place in a US/UK fusion world, with deference (for the most part) to US infrastructure and UK language choice, because it’s what I know and how the original was written, respectively.  
> I have queered and re-gendered and race-bent Tolkien’s original characters all to hell. If there’s anything you find offensive, lemme know. (I’m a cis white ace lady, so this has involved a lot of writing what I don’t know.)   
> If there’s anything you find questionable as a decision based on that character’s canonical personality, lemme know for entirely different reasons (namely that if you care that much you seem to be the sort of person I’d like to spent a lot of time talking to about minor characters and their backstory and decisions they made in the context of a huge mythology like this). Y’all don’t even know my love for Bifur. Also this almost became a fic about Ori and only Ori.   
> If you recognize it, or if it’s a bastardized version of something you recognize, it’s not mine.   
> I got Dorian’s name from the fic “In which they were young and without crowns”; all credit for that brilliant modernization of “Dori” goes to that author.  
> Many thanks to a cadre of betas: ongreenergrasses, my beloved beta and friend that talked me through the hardest parts of all of this; rigatona, who saved me from a myriad of unnoticed punctuation and grammar errors, even though the Hobbit is absolutely not her thing; and delightfullyderanged (on tumblr) who actually likes this stuff. :)
> 
> Trigger warnings: Misgendering (I'll warn for the chapter in which it happens specifically.) Purely emotional/non-physical underaged relationship, age difference.

Garrett DeGray was a genius in the truest sense; he could have been anything that he wanted to be, and been the best at it to boot. His choice of the church as a career disappointed a lot of people, not that they’d ever told him so. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else, and his parishioners all thought him odd but kind, always smiling but able to be deathly serious when the occasion called for it. More than one child had been put off serious mischief forever once Father DeGray had chastised them for it.

There had been no grand moment of discovery for Garrett; from the time he was a child, he had remembered the events and experiences of his past life. It led to him being considered rather mature for his age, no matter what age that happened to be. He had realized soon enough that he was older than the rest; far too old, by a generation, at least. About the time he hit middle age and realized how many of his companions were left unaccounted for, he came to the conclusion he’d probably never even see the youngest members of the company. He accounted for it as the bad luck of being one of the Maiar. But he did his duty and carried on, and no one suspected a thing; he kept it that way, living a quiet, sedate life, telling wonderful stories to the children whose families attended his church and amusing them with sleight of hand (and, every once in a while, something more). He spent his life waiting, biding his time and watching for the people he knew would arrive eventually, to be directed about by him, if he were still alive. If not, they’d have to muddle through without him. If pressed, he’d have told you that as old as he was, all he could feasibly ask was to survive long enough to see the youngest born, and from then on he thought they might do alright for themselves without his help. He just wanted to be sure they all got to the right time and place. Can’t have half the company gallivanting about in another century altogether, after all. Wouldn’t do.

His wish was granted the morning he performed a christening for a young family, father a well-to-do business owner, his family a prominent one around town. The mother was a bit of a stranger, more or less a newcomer with a reputation twice her size and just as colorful. They were christening their first child, and had come to Garrett to perform the ceremony. He’d done the father’s as well, and possibly his parents before him. The child was a girl, named Belladonna Baggins, after some older relative on her mother’s side. After the christening, as everyone milled about and gathered their things, his father mentioned off-handedly that they weren’t sure what to call the child; she was a tiny, delicate thing, and Belladonna was quite the mouthful. They had tossed around Belle, Bella, Donna, and all configurations thereof, but none of them quite fit.Garrett stunned them all when he sternly replied that the only appropriate shortening of that name was Bilbo, tone brooking no discussion on the matter. Some things are better left unchanged, and for Garrett, there was no other name for Bilbo Baggins. Sometimes Father DeGray could say things in such a way that you felt two feet tall and silly for even thinking otherwise; there was no doubt that from that day forward, young Belladonna Baggins would be known to all and sundry as Bilbo, and no reason needed as to why. It soon became that everyone in town called the precocious little girl Bilbo, and not too very long afterwards, no one could have told you how it came about.

The next time Father DeGray saw the little girl more than in passing was to perform her mother’s funeral. She was 16 and lost; her father sat at the other end of the pew, the rest of the mourning family members between them. It wasn’t long after that, a few years at most, and Garrett presided over her father’s funeral too. At that one, she stood tall, as though the years had given her a secret store of strength from which to draw. After that, he never saw her again; she left town, most said, to take over her ailing grandfather’s bookstore. A few, however, muttered that it was more likely to get away from all the memories.

Perhaps two years later, Garrett DeGray passed in his sleep, old enough that no one could remember how old he was, exactly, where he’d come from, nor remember a time when he was not a fixture in their daily lives. Even decades after his death, people told their children about the eccentric old priest they’d all adored, the one who told marvelous stories and always had the very best fireworks.

~

TRAGIC FIRE CLAIMS 39 LIVES

EREBOR ENTERPRISES’ FUTURE IN JEOPARDY

[…]The accident claimed the lives of not only several workers and administrative staff, but also the company’s owners, moguls and business royalty Theodore and Opal Durin. This loss comes right on the heels of the tragic loss of their son Frederick just a few weeks ago; they leave behind two daughters, Lauren and Diana, whose inheritance is now in question[...]There appears to be some confusion surrounding the wills of the Durin family. As of today, the legal owner of Erebor Enterprises appears to be Josef Smaug, a foreign national who swept in out of nowhere and took the business world by storm[…]Among other properties, he snatched up shares of Erebor Enterprises (ERE) over the course of a year; just before the accident he owned a majority of the openly traded shares of the company as well as being the company’s CFO. He has come to be known in financial and business circles as “The Dragon”, due to his ruthless policies as well as his takeovers of several monolithic companies in just his few months since arriving in the country[…] With the deaths of the three eldest Durins and some of the new documents that have come to light, he has inherited the empire built by the Durin family for generations[…] Sources close to the family claim that they intend to fight the inheritance ruling, but their private fortune is comparatively small and both of the potential inheritors are minors, which complicates the court battle; neither of the surviving children had firsthand involvement with the business, nor have they engaged the services of a corporate lawyer. The intrigue-laden battle playing out in the tabloids and business sections alike has driven stock prices down, with uncertainty plaguing investors[…]An investigation is currently underway; those involved refused to comment on an ongoing case.


	2. Filled with the Intent to be Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes with a trigger warning for misgendering. If that's something that will mess you up mentally, please don't read. Your health is the most important thing. (Also just because one of my characters behaves a certain way, it does not mean that I agree with it. just thought I'd throw that out there.) If you are on the fence, a more detailed summary of it is in the notes at the end.

Don’t ask them how it happened. Really, don’t. Call it retrograde memory loss if you like, but to this day they aren’t certain of the exact chain of events, except that they were walking down a crowded sidestreet going nowhere in particular when a fortuneteller who’d been shouting at the passersby suddenly stopped and said, incredibly earnestly, “You two, you must come in.” Her accent was thick and strange, but her voice was so honest and open, it was hard to argue. Each one looked to the other for his opinion; neither one felt strongly against it, so they shrugged their shoulders and in they went. She wouldn’t take their money, just sat them down in a back room and threw something into a censer.

Next thing they knew, they were clinging to each other in a back alley, tears running down their faces, clutching each other, foreheads together. Memories of places and people flying, voices overlapping and rushing in and out, blood and gore just as real as their diplomas from the secondary school down the road and their aunt in chain mail but also a man and also behind her desk where they visited her nearly daily as small children and a few faces they didn’t know, hadn’t seen before yet recognized, men shaped oddly not like men, people they knew intimately but would have walked right past on the street, and maybe none of them look exactly like they had looked…before, but it wasn’t so important, because the person was the same; it was as if you could see their very soul. Swords and cars and aeroplanes and wizards were all jumbled together, memories struggling to sort themselves out, slot themselves in where there was already a lifetime of memories, fighting for dominance, some lying side by side, strangely compatible, all of them whirling around, almost blotting out the night around them, the air was so thick with it.

They stumbled down the sidewalk, dazed with all the information they’d had poured into their brains until it overflowed. Fee more or less dragged his little brother down the street into a coffeehouse where they barricaded themselves into a corner, sorting themselves out and remembering who and where and when they were. Kieran was the first to recover, smiling over-brightly and trying too hard to seem cheerful and unaffected. When he got no response from Fillip, he hesitantly asked, “Fee?”

Like he was waking from a dream, Fillip slowly looked towards Kieran. “Hey, Fee. You back on this earth?”

“We…you…was that real? It feels – felt – real,” he asked, running a hand through his hair.

“It was the same for you?”

“You mean, were we some kind of princes, and adventurers? Did we grow up together, fight a huge battle like something out of a medieval storybook? Did we… die together?”

“Yeah, more or less. I don’t remember you dying, though.” Fillip said lightly, even as he thought, _I died defending your body, little brother, and held your hand as the light faded_ , but he didn’t say it.

“I remember mountains, though. I’ve never even seen mountains, Fee, except in pictures… You know, we were brothers there. Full brothers, I mean.”

“Mmm.”

“Profound, Fee, truly.”

“Shut it!” Fillip replied playfully, almost as if by rote. “It was the same for both of us…”

“Which is more evidence for somehow, this all being real. Both of them, I mean. The realities.”

“You’ve watched too much Doctor Who.”

“I haven’t! And besides, our life’s just become something like out of a movie. What do we even do? Now that we know, apparently, that we’re…what even do you call this?”

“Reincarnation?” He suggested.  
“Sure, let’s go with that,” Kieran agreed. “What’s to be done with it? We just… know all of this now, and we know there are others, like Uncle– Aunt Lauren, and Uncle Dwayne, and…”

Fillip was quiet for a minute, and then spoke, the voice of all knowledge and authority, as far as Kieran was concerned: “I figure they don’t know. They’d have said something if they did. And besides, we didn’t just know, it took someone else helping us along.”

“Should we help them along, then? Have we been handed a quest? Like in films, where an ordinary person - or two persons, in our case - are suddenly extraordinary because they know something, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance, and they have to-“

“Alright, Kee, enough. I don’t think we’re the sort of people other people write books about,” Fillip replied, voice fond and quiet.

Kieran persisted. “But seriously, wouldn’t they want to know? Shouldn’t we, I dunno, tell them or something?”

“And how will we go about that, then? Get them all high as kites on who knows what and hope they have the same bad trip we did?” Filip chuckled. “Fat chance you ever get Aunt Lauren near that place, though Dwayne you might have an easier time with.”

“Well we can’t just sit here, knowing all this, and not tell anyone!” Kili insisted. “Is that what you think we should do, not do anything different, just go about life as if nothing has changed? What if we have to live it all over again? We know better now! We can do better, we could save…” Here he faltered, images seen a lifetime ago suddenly new, vivid and all the more painful for it. Everyone.

“We can’t save them from inside a mental institution, and that’s exactly where we’ll be headed if we go to them with this, before they’re ready to believe us,” Fillip counseled, looking him intently in the eyes, making sure he was properly heard. “We’ll do something, but we can’t rush in. We have to be the wise ones, this time. There’s no one else to do it for us,” he said sagely, reaching up to ruffle his brother’s hair. _God help us all._

~

“I have a plan.”

Fillip rolled over, groaning, and glanced at the clock. “Christ, Kíli, it’s 3 in the morning,” he yawned, then froze. “I meant Kieran. You’re Kieran.” Hanging on to reality was more and more like grasping at straws, especially after just waking up. It seemed like every time he let himself slip away for a moment, he came back with more and more vivid memories of the other him, his other life.

Kieran shrugged, not overly bothered by it, and repeated: “I have a plan. It is a fantastic plan, certain not to backfire or get us institutionalized.”

“You sure it’s one of yours, then?”

“Haha. Very funny. Look at me, I’m in stitches over here.”

“Kee, I shouldn’t be looking anywhere. It’s too early to exist.”

“Would you quit your whining and just shut up and listen?” Kieran was perched on the end of Fillip’s bed. He was tripping over his words, eager to get them out, to hear what his brother would say. “So here’s the idea,” he paused and kicked him. “Stay awake. Now.You and me, we get Dwayne nice and drunk, to the point of maybe or maybe not being able to actually form memories. Then, we try and trigger it. The thing. That happened to us.”

Fillip debated for a moment, and then decided that yes, it was in fact worthwhile to sit up, if only to give Kieran the “you’ve got to be shitting me” look he’d patented at around age six. Kieran had barely been talking then. “Are you serious, Kee? Do you remember how we reacted? And we were sober! Can you imagine you and me trying to keep Dwayne from doing a damn thing he wanted to do? Especially if he’s drunk? You’re out of your mind.”

“I just thought he would take it better, the reminding part, you know, if he were a bit… sloshed,” Kieran continued, undeterred.

“What if we didn’t exactly start with Dwayne?” Fillip offered, resigned to being awake until Kieran was satisfied.

“What do you mean?”

“He has an older sister, you probably don’t remember her, but his sister is… was… is? One of us, at any rate. You were a baby, maybe one or two, the last time Bane came. She’s well and truly old now, the age gap between Dwayne and her is sizeable. She worked for grandma and grandda’s company before Smaug took over, something administrative. At any rate, her age works to our advantage, see, because if she wanted to say we’d gone crazy, or whatever, we could say she dreamed it or imagined it or was a bit senile and we would be alright. At least, a bit more alright than with a blackout drunk Dwayne on our hands, gods almighty, Kieran, what were you thinking?”

“…I was thinking that what works on Dwayne will work on Aunt Lauren.”

“…Fair enough. One at a time, though. And the more people we have on our side, the easier it’ll be each time. Can I go back to sleep now?”

Kieran sighed, making a big to-do of getting out of Fillip’s bed. “If you must,” he replied overdramatically.

“Goodnight, Kieran,” Fillip said, sending him to bed.

“Yeah yeah yeah.” The door closed.

His head barely hit the pillow before he was asleep.

~

Lauren had always felt a little too big for her body, had never grown out of her teenaged clumsiness. She was short, but she never felt compact, never cute. Dwayne would even go so far as to say she was terrifying, except maybe at her very most uncoordinated. She had a way of doing everything with a heaviness, a certainty, even when it was knocking a glass from the counter because she had fumbled her footing. She could look regal even when asking for directions. She was never embarrassed; to look at her, you would think she had planned for everything to go exactly as it went. To see Lauren show shock or surprise was a competition of sorts amongst her family and friends, but after 15 years of surprise parties and jump scares, they’d all but given up. A raised eyebrow was the most you could coax out of her. She handled everything with grace and poise, stoic and steadfast through it all, every high and low. Though she wrongly attributed it to the loss of the empire she had been raised to inherit, there was always a niggling sense in the back of her head that she was meant for more, that this life didn’t quite fit, that feeling of looking at a 3D movie with her glasses off: she could still see everything, but it didn’t look real.

Which is why, when her nephews told her about what they’d seen, and what they now knew, she probably wasn’t anything like as skeptical as they’d expected. It just meant that she finally put the proper glasses on, as it were. It probably helped that they came with the backup of her oldest friend and his sister, one of the people her parents trusted the most in the world. They brought her their story, and she listened without interrupting, only to find that she could sometimes tell them how it ended before they got there, and that their faces were blurring together with faces in her memory. It wasn’t quite as much of a shock as it probably should have been that she used to be a dwarf king in a land that seemed more like an MMORPG than reality, and yes Kieran, she does know what that is, she’s not quite as old as you seem to think.

“So what do you think?” Kieran demanded, impatient as always.

Bane and Dwayne looked at her with sad eyes. They seemed to remember the deaths she was beleaguered by on every side, or at least some of them. The boys, however, seemed not to. Strangely, some of the memories they should have shared came back to all of them, but some apparently didn’t. Kieran and Filip remembered almost identically, from the way they’d told their story, but Bane and Dwayne seemed not to, and she certainly didn’t. She mused that their rhymed names made at least a little more sense now, though honestly not much more. Strange as it should have been, a lot of things were slipping into place in her mind, like she was made for it. Like they had just been taken out for a little while, with every intention of being returned. Like it was always meant to be this way.

Fillip, the golden child, had made tea for everyone and pushed a cup into her hands as she sat back in her chair.

“Well,” she finally said, and if she thought she knew what it was like to have a room hang on her every word before, she had been wrong, “it seems what we’ve got to do now is assemble our company.”

She hadn’t had the heart to tell her boys - precious, beautiful nephews of hers that she loved like sons, that she had raised, boys that thought they fought and died to save her life when she was Prince Thorin II Oakenshield – that the last time they undertook this quest, she hadn’t survived.

~

Dwayne slid off his bike with practiced ease and strode into the same pub that he’d visited at least once a week for nearly a decade. Behind the bar was the same bartender that had been serving up drinks for far longer than that. The man wore a threadbare Metallica t-shirt and a battered pair of jeans that looked wonderfully comfortable, well-worn and filled with holes. He served up drinks without comment, but was always available to listen. If he offered any, his advice was the best you could get, guaranteed to steer you right. You had to be patient enough to hear him out, though; Dwayne often thought that was how Bill judged if you were worth his advice.

His face lit up when he saw Dwayne, and he waved him over, getting ready to pour out a pint of his regular. Dwayne shook his head, falling into the silent communication the two of them shared so easily. This time, though, there was no telling what had to be told without words; so he gestured off to the side of the bar. The pub was fairly empty, it being a weeknight, and so the far end of the bar was as far away from people as one could get without pulling the bartender away from his duties. Not that anyone around here would mind; Bill was a fixture of the place, no more able to be fired than you could fire the front door.

Dwayne sat down on a barstool, elbows propping him up on the bar. “Bill, mate. Have I got a tale for you. I figure my only hope for you retaining any notion of my sanity is that you see for yourself by the time I’m done.” And so, he began. “Ya see, there’s this land, Arda, and there’s all these races. Dwarves, hobbits, men, elves, orcs…”

It didn’t take long, nothing more than a few minutes of Dwayne’s deep voice spinning the story, and suddenly Bill’s knees went weak. He flung an arm out, grabbing for the counter, and slid down with his back against it, unable to stand. Quickly Dwayne hopped the bar, crouching down in front of his friend. Sometimes when people remembered, it was violent, and sometimes it was peaceful; he’d been prepared for both, but he’d hoped for the latter. Slowly Bill raised his head to meet Dwayne’s eyes. He reached out a hand, touching Dwayne’s chest, and slowly slurred, “Dwalin?” His voice was hopeful, a man discovering a hidden treasure, but with a note of trepidation.

“Aye, mate,” he replied. “Dwalin, at your service. And you’d be Bifur.”

~

Bill hadn’t gone home that night intending to locate two more members of the company; he had planned on climbing the stairs behind the bakery, having what would likely be a delicious dinner with his cousins, and then probably crawling into bed to sleep off whatever strange hallucination he’d had at the bar during his shift, maybe after a cup or two of tea (and perhaps something stronger). The last thing he’d planned on was to arrive home only to be beset again by a second wave of memories, this time all concerning two blokes named Bofur and Bombur who were also apparently Bifur’s cousins, and then having to explain why he was on his knees clutching the door to his cousins, who also happened to have once been named Bofur and Bombur. The two of them immediately assumed his collapse had something to do with his head injury, which he scoffed at, internally; that thing hadn’t bothered him in ages, besides the difficulty speaking and occasional aphasia.

Beau hauled him up, hands under his arms, and guided him to the couch. Barbara scuttled in with a cup of tea and handed it to him, patting his knee as she did so. He blinked, rapidly, visions of a fat red-headed dwarf with a beard-rope interspersed with a fat red-headed woman, sugar-white skin and rosy-pink cheeks, hair in the short Peter Pan cut she’d had since she was twenty-two: what he had previously known to be reality.

Knowing he had a ready-made excuse if they didn’t remember, and a bit annoyed that Dwayne hadn’t left him with a bit more of a road map to explaining the whole thing, he began a bit of word-association, hoping they’d catch up quickly. None of them had the energy to sit and wait while he struggled through attempting to tell even the little bit of narrative Dwayne had given him to jog his memory, nor the bits he’d remembered since. Beau squatted at his knee, peering up at him worriedly.

“Dwarves.” His first choice simply left them staring at him blankly, one of Beau’s eyebrows arched in confusion.

“Thorin?” He amended. “Bilbo?”

That changed the expression on their faces, and Bifur hoped he’d gotten across to them what he intended to communicate. Of course he hadn’t. Barbara sat beside him and took his hand, looking to Beau to respond.

Beau was a mite patronizing in his reply. “What about Bilbo? She hasn’t been ‘round in ages. Not since we broke up. She doesn’t even come to the shop much anymore.”

Bill rolled his eyes. Bloody hell.

He decided to go in for a bit more structure.

“We were dwarves,” he managed, and then “Bilbo was a hobbit.”

Barbara and Beau exchanged worried looks. Bill was fast running out of ideas, and if the looks on their faces were any indication, his cousins were running out of patience.

“We went on a quest. For Erebor.” Still nothing but blank faces, beginning to show the first hints of real worry. If he didn’t jog their memory soon, he’d be back in the hospital before he knew it, maybe even in the psych ward. He wracked his brain for anything he could think of, anything at all, that would trigger the landslide of memories for his cousins, but came back empty handed. The worry on their face was getting more pronounced, and he knew that any second now they were going to suggest perhaps he had finally succumbed to what they had all thought would be a fatal head wound anyway. Beau even went so far as to open his mouth, probably to suggest Bill go lie down, and that was about the limit.

“Mahalu-me turg!” _Mahal’s beard!_ He shouted violently. Both Beau and Barbara jerked back, and he reached out as an apology for startling them. However, they didn’t recover, and showed no recognition of his touch; they were both reeling. Beau had fallen flat on his arse, and Barbara had a hand to her own forehead, as though checking herself for fever or manually reining in her thoughts.

Of course, him cursing would trigger it when nothing else did.

He settled back on the couch, content to wait for as long as it took them to come back to their senses. It ended up being a lot faster than he anticipated; not two minutes later, Beau quite suddenly jerked his head up to look Bill in the eye and asked, “Hold on a tick. Did you just curse in… Khuzdul?”

Upon a moment’s reflection, Bill nodded.

“Huh,” Beau replied, and that was that.

~

Lauren had decided that, quote, “it falls to me to assemble the remaining members of my company, before we seek out Mister Baggins.” Behind her back, Kieran had rolled his eyes, but no one had said a word against it, so here they were, en masse, at the door of Dorian, Nora, and Orie North, about to knock.

~

Nori slid his lock picks back into the pocket of his dark blue jeans, and quietly turned the knob to push the door open. There was no sound; so far, so good. He slid in through the narrowly-opened door and stepped gently, not making a sound. The lights in the main room of the flat were off, and he heaved a sigh of relief. He shut the door behind him quietly and moved further into the flat, towards the kitchen, an open set of countertops and an island, with a sink and an oven set in them. He placed each foot gingerly, taking care not to let the rubber soles of his converse squeak against the linoleum. The bleary sunlight from a not-quite-risen sun peered in through the curtains over the sink, giving him just enough light to navigate around the living room furniture. He set his sights on the pantry; carefully navigating the switch from carpet to tile, he slid the last few strides over to the door. He placed a hand on the doorknob, only to feel something hard poking his back. The kitchen light flipped on.

“Nora. What have I told you about breaking in to steal food? You have a house key. This is your home as much as it is Orie’s or mine,” Dorian lectured, removing the spatula from its place poking Nori and instead using it to gesticulate a bit wildly. He had his housecoat flung around him, the belt hastily tied instead of in his usual precise bow.

Without turning, Nori responded, “It must have gone the way of what I’ve told you, countless times, which is that my name is Nori. And since that’s slipped away, I’m sure it’s also slipped your mind that my pronouns are masculine, fuck you very much, Dorian.” He paused, turning to walk towards the cabinets, and then casually added, “and I’ve lost my house key.” With that, he hopped up on the counter top, much to his brother’s annoyance.

“Again?” he sighed, as though he were the most put-upon man in all the world.

“Again,” Nori agreed casually, picking through a tray of pastries.

“At least leave some intact for Orie,” Dorian reminded, conceding defeat on the idea of Nori not picking through the pastries whatsoever.

“Dor, who are you talking to?” A disembodied voice asked from the back bedroom. The lights flipped off and a slightly chubby young girl emerged, about seventeen, wearing a pair of black shorts, neon purple tights, and a geometric patterned sweater, just this side of too garish. Nori grinned upon seeing her; some things never changed. When she saw Nori, her face lit up, and she proceeded to launch herself across the room - only narrowly avoiding several collisions with furniture - and into his arms. He abandoned the plate of pastries to hug her, though his attempts to muss her short hair afterwards were evaded with the ease of long practice.

“How are you, kid? Still can’t dress yourself, I see.” he asked, as she beamed at him.

In response, she stuck out her tongue, but otherwise ignored his barb, offered out of habit rather than any true disapproval. She practically vibrated with excitement. “Great! I’m great. How are you? You’re home, I mean, so that’s great. I’m so happy you’re here, look, I want you to read my latest revision of the manuscript, I took those notes you gave me and I revamped the plot and you were right, it works a lot better now, the elves make so much sense, they’re so sympathetic now; you-“

Dori interrupted with, “Orie, dear, take a breath. Unless Nora’s whims decide otherwise, the two of you will have a while to catch up.” Over Orie’s head he shot Nori a deadly glare, as if to dare him to argue.

“Yeah, darling, I’ll be here a while. Might even be here so long I move back in,” he winked at her, returning the smile to her face.

“Actually-“ Dori began, when there was a knock at the door, cutting off whatever he had intended to bring up.

“I’ve got it,” Orie whirled, removing Nori’s hand from its position on her shoulder where it had been lingering affectionately. Looking through the peephole, all she could see were disembodied shoulders and torsos, but certainly no one she recognized.

“Dor, it’s a bunch of people, we don’t know them.”

“Orie, how many times do I have to tell you, my name is Dorian; I have faith you can manage another syllable.” Changing targets as he made his way to the door, he continued, “Nora, are these some vagabond friends of yours?”

Orie glared back at Dorian. “Would you give it up already? His name’s Nori. And I’m sure this isn’t his fault. He’s only just come back.”

Dorian ignored her, peering through the peephole. “I’ve paid all the bills this month. The landlord’s a crochety 80-year-old struck by arthritis. We don’t frequent loan sharks…”

Dwayne, for his part, was well past annoyed with the delay, and it probably wasn’t helping that the door was thin enough to allow every word spoken on either side to be heard.

“For heaven’s sakes, we’re not here to murder ye or arrest anybody! Just open the bloody door!”

From the kitchen counter, Nori offered, “Who is it, Andre the Giant?”

“Very funny, Nori,” Orie said, clearly meaning just the opposite. She rolled her eyes at Dorian’s distrustful squint, and when it was obvious he still wasn’t going to open the door, she pushed him out of the way. “Good grief,” she replied to his look of utter horror, “who admits to thinking about murdering someone if they actually plan on murdering them?” While Dorian pondered her (mostly rhetorical) question, she unlatched the lock and turned back the deadbolt, swinging open the door. Falling back on the manners Dorian had drilled into her since she could talk, she smiled at the assemblage outside her door and then said, “Come in. Please, have a seat.”

They filed in one by one, Lauren first, followed by Dwayne, who ducked to make it through the doorway, and then Filip and Kieran.

Lauren took the armchair, and Filip and Kieran spread themselves over the entire couch. Dwayne perched on a barstool pulled from the island.

“Orie, dear, shut the door, you’re letting the cold air in,” Dorian gently reminded her. Distantly, she pushed the door closed, but didn’t move from her spot.

“Now, if I may,” Dorian continued, “who are you, and why exactly are you here?” He stood in the focal point of the semicircle their seating choices made, hands clasped, for all the world as if he were the one who called them there. He seemed oddly formal, even in his patched, threadbare housecoat. Filip and Kieran shifted nervously, while Dwayne awkwardly coughed. Lauren struggled to raise herself back up onto the edge of the chair from the cushions into which she had sunk. After a hard-fought battle, she made her way there, and rested her elbows on her knees, collecting her thoughts and what remained of her dignity. “I am Lauren Durin,” she informed him, and then waited, as though expecting some sort of reaction. “This,” she gestured to Dwayne, “is my close friend, Dwayne Fundin, and these are my two nephews, Fillip and Kieran.

“We have come to you with… something of a reminder.” The first thing Nori noticed about the woman was her voice; that it was warm, broad and low and gentle, but beneath the docile waves of her normal speech the threat of a hurricane lurked. “You see, this-“ she gestured vaguely at them and then at the flat around them- “is not all you are. You are something of a rarity, if I am correct. That is, you have been… well, reincarnated.” She paused, to see how this news was taken. Orie still had not moved, and was keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the floor. Nori had raised a single eyebrow, unintentionally and unknowingly mimicking Dorian’s unimpressed eyebrow raise that was currently leveled directly at Lauren.

She sighed. _At least they haven’t rejected me outright. They could have run screaming from me or kicked us out of the house. This is… something._

“Let me explain,” she offered to the awkward silence.

“Please, do,” Dorian replied dryly.

“You see, there was a time and a place where we all existed as dwarves. Everyone in this room. And we went on a quest together, and fought a dragon, and- and now I suppose we have to do it again. Because here we all are, again, strangely parallel to our old lives. In the last life, these two -“ she gestured to Fillip and Kieran - “were my nephews; it is the same here. Dwayne and I, in both universes, have been lifelong friends. The three of you have always been brothers. I have always lost a kingdom, though once metaphorically and once quite literally. There is a dragon to slay; last time it was a literal fire-breathing dragon, this time a man, known to the business world as The Dragon.” She paused, and a lesser woman might have heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I know that none of this is terribly convincing; the idea is to evoke something which triggers your own memories to return. That is what happened for all of us, starting with Fillip and Kieran.” Here she gestured at them, and they both straightened, as if called upon to testify in court.

From the kitchen, Nori snorted. “Yeah mate, most people would call that a shared delusion, not reincarnation.” However, Dorian looked less certain.

“Memories like… what?” He asked.

The air in the room became quite a bit thicker. The atmosphere was tangible, heavy.

Quietly and earnestly, Lauren answered, “Like a song, the melody you can’t quite place, but it sings in your bones when you’re homesick. Like never quite feeling as though you fit. Like sometimes wishing for a sword in your hand more than anything else. Like braids that spring to your fingers more easily than your signature. Like life inside a mountain for decades, never caring to see the sun.” Her voice dropped into an easy, hypnotizing rhythm. “Memories of places you’ve never been and faces you’ve never seen. Knowledge of geography that doesn’t exist. The certainty that you’ve slept beneath nothing but a canopy of stars, even if you’ve never camped a night in your life. Dreams of your brothers, covered in blood. Not just family, but brothers you’ve been given by fate, family forged by experience, not lineage. The ache of something missing, deep within.”

Dorian took a shattered breath, then released it. “I know those memories.” He nodded, eyes distant.

The tension snapped when Nori guffawed. “Surely you’re not buying into this, Dor? Come on, they’re… they’re clearly on some sort of drug. To be fair, it sounds like a hell of a trip, I don’t blame them, but… seriously? Reincarnation? That’s madness.”

Orie, never moving from her place by the door, suddenly volunteered shyly, “I was Ori, same as now. Well, minus the ‘e’,” she conceded. All eyes were on her. “And you,” she looked to Nori, “You were Nori, the same too, but that was what they named you when you were born. And Dor, you were Dori, my big brother. We all had different fathers… We lived in Erebor, but we’d never met…” Here she lifted her head to look at Lauren. “Well, you. We’d never so much as seen Prince Thorin, besides huge official…” she searched for the word, but soon gave up, with an exasperated hand gesture. “…public appearances. I was a scribe?” She asked, holding her hands out in front of her, consulting them, uncertain, but then chuckled to herself. “Yeah. It feels true.” She turned back to Nori, eyes imploring, as though her heart would break if he didn’t believe as well. He laughed again, disparagingly, but with less strength. His conviction wavered.

“C’mon, Oreo, not you too?” He looked from face to face, searching for someone who seemed not to buy in wholeheartedly. His search came up with nothing.

A giggle from Orie burst the silence, and suddenly everyone looked to her. Her cheeks blossomed red, and she ducked her head again. Peering up from behind her lashes, she informed Nori: “It’s just… you had starfish hair!” She gestured out to the sides of her head, suggesting the shape.

And, just like that, Nori remembered.

~

“I’ve never felt like this before, Dorian.” Orie said, her body slumped over an arm of the couch, hanging upside down. “But at the same time, it feels so familiar. Like a scent that you know you know, but you can’t place it. You know?” 

“And how is it that you feel, pray tell, little sister?” Dorian stood at the counter, bemusedly looking over his glasses and chopping carrots for dinner. No matter what earth-shattering revelations had been shared that morning, the meal wasn’t going to make itself. Nori was perched on the counter beside him, pointedly not helping, legs swinging back and forth, feet beating against the counter in the most annoying tattoo Dorian had ever heard.

“Like he walked in and suddenly I couldn’t summon words. You know me, I’m the wordiest person in the world!” Over the back of the couch, Dorian could see flailing arms, hands flapping. “And then I was suddenly so self-conscious, like it mattered whether or not I had put on makeup this morning, and what shirt I was wearing… And I kept hoping he’d look at me but I was also terrified when he did. Just looking at him was enough to tie my stomach in knots. Am I going crazy?”

Nori just snorted in response.

Dorian, however, rolled his eyes at Nori and then engaged damage control mode. “Orie, it sounds like just a little crush. I know you haven’t really had a lot of dealings with boys, but honestly, I’m sure it’ll go away soon and you’ll be back to normal in no time, talking all our ears off no matter who’s around, and we’ll look back on this and laugh.” He prided himself on the fact that he had more or less managed to keep the panic out of his voice. Thus far, he’d been lucky. Raising a little sister was one thing, but coaxing your late-bloomer baby sister into the wide world of sexual exploration was quite another.

“But like you said, I’ve never had a crush on anyone, not really. And I’ve never dated. And I’ve never felt this way before, really, but at the same time, it’s _so familiar_.”

Nori snorted again, and then gave up his obstinate silence. “Ye gods, and I’m meant to be the least smart of the three of us? Come on!” He turned to Orie, and told her, in a kinder voice, “You’re excused dear, you’re in the throes of young love. But you -“ He rounded on Dorian, “You’ve got no excuse except you either aren’t thinking or you’re purposefully keeping it from her. Haven’t we just found out we’re reincarnated? So obviously you felt like this about the Big Guy last time, and now it’s just transferred. You’ve never had a crush on anyone in this life until now, but you recognize the feeling because you’ve felt it for him before. So, essentially, what you have is a crush that’s spanned two lifetimes. Well done, sis.” He gave her two thumbs up, but she never even looked his way.

Dorian had just begun to chastise Nori when something between a muffled sob and a wail emerged from Orie’s new position, face down and sprawled out on the couch.

“Goodness Orie,” Dorian said, voice dripping with sarcasm, “I was under the impression these sorts of things were joyous occasions.”

Orie’s voice would have been perfectly suited to a soap opera star’s most dramatic monologue, it was so full to the brim of melodrama. “I remember!”

Nori piped in with, “Also rarely a bad thing.”

“No, but I remember so much with him in it, and even all the stuff I’ve remembered since the first bit, I still don’t remember him reciprocating. What if he doesn’t?? What if I’ve been creepily crushing on him for two lifetimes? What kind of weirdo does that? And he didn’t even react when he saw me! He barely moved! Who falls for someone and doesn’t even react???” Both of her brothers heroically avoided mentioning that she had, in fact, not visibly reacted when she ‘fell for’ Dwayne. Her brothers were well experienced in the knowledge that Orie tended towards shyness around strangers.

Dorian gave her a pitying look. Abandoning his cutting board for a moment, he walked over and, kneeling beside her, began soothingly rubbing her back. “Orie, it’s quite possible that he doesn’t remember. We’ve all been getting things back a bit helter-skelter, perhaps he just hasn’t gotten those bits back yet?”

“Yeah, or maybe he just doesn’t feel the same way. That’s always an opti-”

Two pillows launched themselves simultaneously at Nori; he fell off the counter trying to avoid them.

“Hey!”

~

At the end of a turn-off from a side street of a frequently used thoroughfare just a few blocks down from the city’s main business district, there was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of that cul-de-sac there was a bookstore, and above that bookstore was a flat. Not a nasty, damp, cockroach-infested, mildewy flat, but a nice, warm, cozy, well-kept flat; and in that flat, there lived a woman.

Her name was Bilbo Baggins.

Well, not strictly speaking, mind. Her given name was actually Belladonna, after some relative long deceased, but everyone inexplicably called her Bilbo. She didn’t mind.

The Baggins family had owned Mr. Baggins' Fine Books, Maps, Odds & Ends (“Bag End”, for short) for four generations, but Bilbo Baggins had been the first since her great-grandfather to take an active hand in it. The others had all gone off and done something else, gotten married, had children, never cared at all for the shop; everyone, except Bilbo. She was quite happy running his bookstore, living life as a happily unmarried semi-confirmed bachelorette (she was comfortably bisexual, thank you very much, not even so much as a tiny crisis over it in years), and unwinding with a cup of tea and a good book at the end of the day. Every day. She had plants all over her flat, and window boxes in every available window, and she didn’t have a complaint in the world. Everything was fine. She got plenty of social interaction chatting with Gaffer, who worked as a handyman in several of the buildings in the area, including hers, and his young grandson Sam. Sam would often tag along to help with repairs, and some days Bilbo even let him tend the shop for a bit, as long as they weren’t too busy. They hardly ever were.

So yes. Thank you very much, Lobelia, but she had no desire for a visit from her and Otto especially since they would inevitably just never leave, and nick all her nice silver to boot. Her flat was a good size, just the way she liked it, and she had everything arranged just so from years of habit. Everything had a place, and it never felt too cluttered nor too empty. She ate dinner at precisely 7 in the evening, which she cooked for herself except on Thursdays when she got takeout; she retired to bed at exactly 11 pm, waking at 6:30 and opening the shop by 8. It was open seven days a week until 6:30 pm, except on very special holidays when Bilbo went to visit family. She had plenty of books, a city’s worth of takeout options, and could walk or bike everywhere she cared to go (or take a cab to the airport if the notion of a holiday took her). Sometimes she even went to see a movie, and she always had a bag full of tobacco for her pipe, her one true vice. Her mother had never let her hear the end of that one, but her father had just chuckled and taught her how to smoke it properly.

Yes, Bilbo Baggins was quite content in her life, habitual as it was. Some might even say complacent. Of course, everyone knows that complacency and contentment are a siren song for adventures, so it should come as no surprise to anyone (save maybe Bilbo) that one night, later than she would have liked, she opened the door to find two boys, maybe a few years older than young Sam, who greeted her with, “Hello, Bilbo, remember us?” to find that she did, in fact, remember them. And the eleven others they brought behind them.

And that was just the beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Misgendering: a character's brother refuses to change his pronouns or call him by his name, instead using his birth name and incorrect pronouns. His sister is supportive and at one point stands up for him.


	3. Their Loss Is No Disaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I assume you all know why we are assembled here. We have been granted a second chance, as it were. We have been reincarnated, and offered a history closely resembling that which we have lived before. I believe we are meant to, well,” she faltered for a moment, and then recovered: “to repeat our quest, for whatever reason.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a thousand excuses as to why this took so long and none of them are quite good enough to explain a 6 or 8 month hiatus. Hopefully, the fact that with this chapter, the story doubles in size will help to make amends.  
> I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Bilbo had only just sat down to dinner when the bell rang. She rarely had visitors, and especially not in the evenings, so she went down to peer out of the door rather than using the intercom. On her way out, she heaved a sigh, casting a single longing look back at her hot meal: fish perfectly cooked, salad fresh from the market just a few blocks away. When she opened the door, she was confronted by two teenage boys: a brunet in a blue hoodie with a sparse smattering of facial hair, and another, slightly taller, blond, with nearly a full beard, and wearing a deep blue dress shirt and black slacks. The taller one spoke first. 

“Hello, Bilbo. Remember us?” He asked with a cheeky grin.

She wrinkled her brow and stared at them for a good half a minute before she finally replied, “Actually, I rather think I do. Though for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you from where.”

“Well, that’s quite alright. You’re already doing better than most.” And with that, the blond led the way into her house, trailed by his companion. Their strange little train was completed by Bilbo, who shut the door with an examining look and then followed them into her flat.

By the time she rounded the doorway, both the boys had already sprawled out onto various pieces of furniture and were toeing their shoes off, at least having the good manners to push them beneath the seat they were occupying. Bilbo was rendered speechless by their gall, but soon recovered.

“I’m sorry, can I help you with something?” she asked, a bit shortly.

Both boys looked up at her from where they had begun their own conversation about people she’d never met and places she’d never been. “Oh. The others should be along in a bit, we can’t really start until they get here, you know?” And with that, they returned to their conversation. 

Bilbo coughed, politely, and interrupted again: “I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch your names…?”

“Oh?” the blond one replied, looking far more confused than he had any right to. “Oh, yes, our _names_ ,” he said, in a tone of voice that left the wink and nudge unseen but very much implied. “I’m Filip, Filip Durin, and this lump,” the other boy raised a hand in something resembling a wave, “is my baby brother Kieran.” A muffled protest, presumably at the idea of being a baby anything, could be heard from Kieran, but was summarily ignored. 

Before Bilbo could politely interrogate even further, another chime of the doorbell sounded. She excused herself with a distant “I’ll be right back,” wondering what sort of people these “others” were.

When she reached the door, she was this time greeted by a hulking great man in quite a bit of leather and metal, very tattooed and a bit intimidating, but strangely familiar and unthreatening. With him was a older man, hair greying, who wore a t-shirt and blue jeans that somehow managed to be appropriate, rather than making him seem as though he was reaching for a long-distant youth. 

The bigger one bowed slightly, and said, “Dwayne, and Bill, at your service, ma’am.” He strode in, bumping into her as he passed and she gave no room for him to do so, and continued, “is anyone else here yet?”

“Filip and Kieran are upstairs,” she heard herself offer automatically. She cast a suspicious glance at the street outside and shut the door, following another pair of men up her stairs.

When she arrived, they were deep in greetings and introductions. She sighed and put on a pot of tea; no reason to be completely inhospitable. She began pulling out mugs and cups, but had to wrack her brain for the location of a fifth mug; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this many people in her flat. As she stood on the counter and carefully maneuvered her way around the open cabinet door to reach the top shelf, the doorbell chimed. Again. 

Heaving a heavy, exasperated sigh, she traipsed down the stairs once again, and flung the door open - a bit impatiently to tell the truth. 

It was yet another group of people, this time a girl and two men; the girl was very young, only a teenager, wearing a floral dress underneath an oversized sweater, with tights underneath. She gave the impression of having robbed a thrift store to assemble her outfit. The men she arrived with were both quite a bit older, one wearing tight jeans and a sweatshirt that Bilbo thought must be nearly as old as she was. The eldest of the three was wearing slacks and a khaki cardigan with elbow pads over a dark red button-up shirt; he reminded her of nothing so much as a college professor. All three had skin the color of sunlight through amber and thick, blue-black hair. They introduced themselves as Orie, Nori, and Dorian respectively, and Bilbo felt a spike of affection for Dorian, who wiped his shoes on the mat before following his companions up the stairs. 

After that, Bilbo rather gave up answering the door. She shouted over the din in her sitting room that if the bell rang again, they were responsible for answering it, and set about making tea and searching out snacks. Filip, Kieran, Orie, and Nori all set upon the food as if they hadn’t eaten in days, while Dwayne loudly interrogated her as to the presence of beer in the flat. She sternly informed him that there was none and he was unlikely to find a place open that would sell him any at this hour.

The bell rang again, and as instructed, Filip darted down to answer it. After a minute, Bilbo heard him bellow up the stairs, “Bilbo! It’s for you!”

As she made her way down the stairs, she muttered to herself, “I bloody well know it’s for me, it’s my bloody door, you’d be surprised how little traffic I get that isn’t for me, Master Filip.” A niggling voice in her head said she sounded like her father, but she shoved it aside.

When she got to the door, however, she was stopped short in her admonitions. The man at the door was certainly no member of the merry band currently occupying her sitting room; he was well dressed, in a neat suit, and wore it with the air of someone who doesn’t spend much time wearing anything else. In his hand was a briefcase and the other held an envelope. Bilbo dismissed Filip to return up the stairs, and cocked an eyebrow at the stranger. He startled into action, stuttering out, “Hello, I’m here on behalf of the estate of Garrett DeGray. He bequeathed to you this letter, which he wrote shortly before his passing. Sorry it’s a bit late, we’ve had a job of finding you. You moved, from where he said you’d be in the will, and we had to track you down. He left this for you, to be delivered…” Here, his monologue was blessedly interrupted by a thorough search of the paper in his hand for some sort of date, after which he continued, “…quite a bit ago, apparently. but we had to find you ourselves, you see… like I said.”

Rolling her eyes heavenward, Bilbo stuck out her hand, and demanded, “Give it here.” He handed it to her and received a perfunctory “Thank you” and the door in his face for his troubles. Bilbo sunk back against the door, coming to a cross-legged seated position, and opened up the envelope. The name hadn’t sounded familiar at first, but the longer she thought about it, the more it seemed like that had been the name of the priest in her home parish. Not that he had any reason to be writing her letters from the grave, but it would not be the strangest thing she’d encountered tonight. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of thick paper, of the weight people rarely used anymore, upon which was handwritten a letter.

 

“My dear Bilbo,

Chances are that you will not remember me. It is of little importance. Suffice to say that I knew you as a child, and we were friends.

I do hope that this letter has found you at the proper time. If I am correct in my calculations, you will be receiving it somewhere around the time a rather large group of people shows up on your front stoop. If I must be wrong, (and I very rarely am) I hope this letter finds you rather beforehand than afterwards. 

Barring completely the idea that it might find you so much later after that particular event that it no longer does you any good, I must advise you on the proper choice to make. _GO WITH THEM_. This is of the utmost importance. They will none of them make it past the end of your street if they go alone. (I exaggerate, but the sentiment is accurate.) They need you, and so, whatever misgivings or doubts you may be harboring, ignore them. Remember your mother; think of what she would advise. Think of the life you once imagined for yourself. This is your chance, Bilbo Baggins. 

I do regret that I could not be there to give you my message in person. Rest assured that I would have been in your parlor with all the rest of them, were it an option. I count myself one of the lucky ones; here, at the end of my life, I find that I do not regret a great many things, but I regret missing this adventure, even if it is not for the first time.

I cannot promise that you will return from this journey the same person you were when you started it. In fact, I cannot promise that you will return at all. But I can promise that you will be the better for it, and that what you have always been looking for is not in your books and movies and television shows, but with them. They need you, and whether you know it or not, Belladonna, you need them.

So make haste! You never know the value of a wasted moment until it is too late.

Until next time, I remain, undoubtedly yours,

Garrett DeGray”

 

Bilbo looked up, unexpected tears in her eyes. Try as she might, she couldn’t imagine what the ragtag bunch of humans in her sitting room would want her company for. Something in her, though, beneath her thoughts, beneath the unexpected memories of the town where she’d grown up, was insistent. It hummed, a deep, warm melody that vibrated her very bones, a bass that she could feel in her soul. _Far over the misty mountains cold, to dungeons deep, and caverns old…_

Shaking her head, she interrupted her own reverie and hauled herself up. The tea wasn’t going to serve itself, and she was the hostess, however involuntarily. She trooped right back up the stairs, putting on her bravest, best hostessing face. 

She only made it about halfway up, however, before the doorbell rang once more. She could hear the trampling feet of two teenage boys racing for the stairway, and bellowed in their direction, “I’ve got it!” The footsteps returned, dejectedly, to their places. She swung the door open (again) and prepared for another round of introductions. Instead, she was faced with a pair of friends. 

“Beau! Babs! What are the two of you doing here? Did we have plans for tonight?” 

Beau snorted good-naturedly and replied, “You haven’t had a planned encounter with me in years, lass, and you know it. No, we’re here for the meeting,” he gestured upstairs.

“Oh no,” Bilbo lamented, “Not you too! Barbara?” She turned to Beau’s companion, who nodded, and replied: “Us too, I’m afraid.” She did not sound apologetic in the least.

“Well, come on up, then,” Bilbo said, resigned. As the both passed her by, each gave her a quick hug. Barbara gave her a quick peck on the cheek as well, and whispered, “He wasn’t sure about coming, you know. But I convinced him.”

“I’m sure I’ll be most grateful to you one day,” Bilbo smiled, “but right now I’m a bit confused.”

“Oh? What about, dear?” 

“You were a man before!” That had _not_ been what she intended to say. Aghast, she amended, “I beg your pardon, I’m clearly not myself tonight.”

Barbara just laughed. “Darling, we’ve all been having those sorts of revelations. If it’s any help to you, so were you.” With that, she made her way up the stairs. Bilbo turned to follow her, only just realizing the door was still standing wide open. She moved to close it, and out of the darkness materialized another group of people, on her doorstep. She only barely stifled a scream.

“And who would you be, then?” She asked with the air of someone who can no longer be shocked.

The group was of three people, an older woman and two younger people, obviously brother and sister. The older woman wore a neat, businesslike black dress and sensible heels, and her grey hair was cut cleanly to her ears, and neatly combed. She nodded at Bilbo and introduced herself as Bane. Her face could easily have been severe, but the way she smiled rounded out the hooked nose and sharp cheekbones to something warm and friendly. The other two were tall and very dark-skinned. The man had short hair, cut very close to his scalp, and wore blue jeans and a sweater. He had bright eyes and a ready smile, and introduced himself as Glenn, their neighborhood’s representative on the city council. Bilbo vaguely remembered meeting him back when he’d been campaigning. His sister had an afro, like a halo around her head, and wore a long colorful skirt with a black long-sleeved top. She had a bag slung over her shoulder. She offered her hand to shake and introduced herself as Olene, with a murmured, “nice to meet you.” 

Looking between the three of them, Bilbo asked, mostly rhetorically, “is this all of you, then?”

Bane took her at her word and answered with another question. “Well, how many have you already got?”

She did some quick math in her head and replied, “With the three of you, twelve.”

“Then you’re one short. Beg pardon,” and with that Bane marched in, followed by her companions. When Olene passed, Bilbo noticed she had a hearing aid looped around the back of her ear, and made a point to remember it when she spoke to her. As was fast becoming her habit, Bilbo followed them up the stairs, grumbling to herself about usurping strangers who don’t even wait to be asked in.

“They must have kept Aunt Lauren late again,” she heard Kieran muse as he watched the last trio of people file into the room. To no one in particular, he continued, “I’m not entirely sure it’s not because he wants her to sleep with him. I’ve heard him hitting on her before; I’ve half a mind to go in there and give him what for - ” Here Filip interrupted his brother by cuffing him in the head and hissing at him to _shut it_. Everyone had settled onto couches and chairs; the seats from around her kitchen table had been dragged into the sitting room, and the younger ones had been bumped down to sitting on the floor. There was a second kettle of water already boiling, and she said a quick prayer of thanks for strangers who can at least make their own tea.

She pulled down her last three mugs, and after rinsing the dust out of them, she stuck three teabags in them and poured hot water over the lot. She dispensed them to three people who weren’t yet holding mugs, and then surveyed the room, calculating how many more she’d need. She noticed that food she certainly hadn’t served was strewn over every available surface; someone had clearly been in her pantry. She sighed heavily, and rounded back to search for six more mugs, noticing in passing that her dinner had disappeared from the kitchen table as well. 

Five minutes later, she had been through every cabinet and drawer in her kitchen, and couldn’t find a single cup more for serving tea in. She cast a glance over at the china cabinet; it would be terribly rude to not offer all of her guests tea, especially when the night was as cold as it was, but to serve these strangers in her mother’s china? What if they broke a piece? Few of them looked particularly delicate, or gentle, but she couldn’t bear to be a bad hostess. Her options were limited, and she could practically feel her father’s scowl, shaming her for being impolite. There was nothing else for it; she carefully opened the cabinet and removed, one by one, teacups enough to serve everyone in her sitting room. With a pained expression, she carried their tea in to them, two by two, until everyone was equipped with a mug or cup. It was right about then someone asked if they couldn’t have another cup, and she was forced to round back on the kitchen and start another kettle of water. 

There was such a din from the other room, she could almost feel it in her bones, like bass at a concert. She began slamming cabinets in protest, but she could barely hear it, so she knew her guests couldn’t. There were foodstuffs spread all over the kitchen, and as the water heated, she tried to tidy up a bit; it seemed to be in vain. For all the mess she cleaned up, the rest seemed to multiply. They’d tracked mud everywhere, and not a single one of them had seemed able to find the trashcan or the sink, from the looks of the countertop. She thought she heard chimes, and paused, listening, but heard nothing else, and so continued to tidy up. Then she heard it again, and was almost certain it was the front door, but no one else reacted. The roar from the sitting room didn’t diminish a whit, and not for the first time Bilbo was grateful that she lived alone in a building she owned, with no neighbors who would call and complain about the awful noise. The kettle clicked and brought her back to reality. She lifted it off the base and went to pour the water, when a terrible banging came from downstairs. She jerked, and spilt the hot water across her wrist. Swearing, she slammed down the kettle and stuck her wrist under the tap, running cold water over it. Torn between fixing the burn and answering the door, she hastily soaked a rag in cold water and wrapped it around her wrist. 

She hurried down the stairs, completely unnoticed by the party occupying her sitting room, and flung the door open. Had Bilbo been a little taller, she likely would have been punched in the face by the woman, whose hand was raised to knock on a door that was no longer there. She wore business attire: a pencil skirt in a very becoming shade of dark blue, button up white blouse, nude heels; all of it had the air of something expensive but old, well-taken care of but near worn out, and all of it was at least a decade out of fashion. Her hair was pulled up behind her in a simple chignon, though a few strands were starting to come loose. It was dark and thick, a little wavy, with a touch of grey at the temples, and Bilbo wanted to reach out and run her hands through it. The woman’s face, though, was set in a sort of not-quite-scowl that Bilbo thought was probably permanent, judging by the lines it had etched into her face. She looked only a few years older than Bilbo herself, but carried the weight of the years differently, as though they were twice as heavy on her shoulders. Bilbo cocked an eyebrow at her, evaluation complete. “You’d be Lauren, then?” 

Her eyebrows shot up with surprise, as though she hadn’t been prepared for Bilbo to know her by name. She responded,“I am,” voice honey-mellow and deep. Bilbo had to look up at her, and thought that even if she weren’t wearing those heels, Lauren would be the taller of the two. 

“You’re late,” Bilbo told her, and turned around to head back up the stairs, not caring one whit if the woman followed her or not. She did allow herself a small grin when she heard the door shut quietly behind her and footsteps trail her up the stairs. 

When they reentered her flat, the entire sitting room went quiet. Bilbo rather wished she knew what trick Lauren used to have that effect, but she supposed it had something to do with the piercing blue eyes and lack of smiling. Possibly lack of ability to smile. The whole world quite suddenly felt very loud and intense; the silence was overbearing after the violent noise of earlier. Bilbo could hear her pulse in her ears and every breath felt amplified for the whole block to hear. A stillness descended over all of them; even Kieran, who gave Bilbo the distinct impression of never being still, even in sleep, was not moving. Slowly, with gravity, each of them looked around at each of the others; something fell, snapped into place, and their momentary peace was broken, but with a purpose. 

“I apologize for my tardiness. Work kept me late,” Lauren explained, though Bilbo couldn’t picture anyone in this room demanding an explanation of her. Bane rose from her place in Bilbo’s armchair, arms open to Lauren, and they embraced. Bane kissed her forehead and smiled at her. 

“Everyone is here. We’re all accounted for.”

Lauren nodded to her, and Bane returned from her place. Bilbo stood, still only just through the doorway, momentarily forgotten. Lauren whirled on her, not threatening, but quickly, surprised. After a moment, the crease in her forehead lifted and she nodded unconsciously. “ _Miss_ Baggins, then. Appropriate.” A wry grin colored her face for an instant, a flash so brief Bilbo was sure only she saw it. “Is everyone acquainted?” Most people nodded, having accomplished that much while awaiting Lauren’s arrival. “Excellent. Then we may begin.

“I assume you all know why we are assembled here. We have been granted a second chance, as it were. We have been reincarnated, and offered a history closely resembling that which we have lived before. I believe we are meant to, well,” she faltered for a moment, and then recovered: “to repeat our quest, for whatever reason.” 

“Well, clearly we bollocksed it up last time, didn’t we?” Dwayne’s voice boomed from back in the corner where he had made himself at home. Every eye in the room turned to look at him, and he became a bit less self-assured. “I mean, we got set back up to do the whole thing again, why would someone go to all that trouble if not so that we would do it better?Got the benefit of hindsight, as it were, this time around. Do it proper, not all die along the way, actually make it to Erebor. That sort a’thing.” 

“Aye, that seems obvious enough,” Bane agreed, and if you were watching closely, as Bilbo was, Lauren almost looked chastised. 

“Look, I’m sorry,” Bilbo piped up, “but what on earth are you all here for? Why do I recognize every single one of you, but most of you I can’t place? What is all this?”

The entire room, even stone-faced Lauren, looked at Bilbo with something akin to horror. 

“You mean you don’t remember?” Kieran asked, scandalized.

“I… I suppose not, judging by your faces.” Bilbo stood, awaiting an explanation, but none was forthcoming. Finally, Glenn coughed out, “Bane,” jerking his head towards Bilbo. The older woman gently approached Bilbo, as though worried she would startle. 

Within just a few minutes, Bane had taken Bilbo through a summarized version of their first meeting. At the point in the story when a pile of dwarves collapsed through her front door, Bilbo held up a single finger, stopping the flow of Bane’s story. The room waited in silence, and then Dorian piped up, “Bilbo, are you quite alright?” 

Bilbo nodded enthusiastically but couldn’t seem to stop. “Just fine,” she said, high-pitched. “I just, mmm… need a moment.” With that, her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell out in a dead faint. 

~

Quite a lot of commotion later, Bilbo was set up in a chair with a blanket around her and a cup of tea in her hand. She was terribly annoyed by all of the fussing they were doing, but she couldn’t bear to snap at them, seeing as she’d given them such a fright. She put up with it stoically, she thought. 

When all the hubbub had quieted down and everyone was settled back in, Dorian started them all back in with, “It’s all well and good we’ve got this knowledge, now, but what do we do with it?”

“Well, take back Erebor, of course,” Bane’s rejoinder came.

“And how do we go about doing that?” Kieran asked, all wide-eyed belief and naiveté, completely confident that his elders had a brilliant plan. 

“As bloody directly as we can, I should think,” Olene said. “I’ve no wish to adhere to some path we’ve trod before simply because it’s familiar.”

“As far as we can tell, everyone has a different knowledge of events, so I don’t foresee us all being inclined towards following a prescribed path. This is a different world, though the stakes are no less, and it would make little sense,” Lauren agreed. Orie hated to argue with royalty, but she rather thought there wouldn’t end up being much of an option. Fate usually had its own way in these sorts of things, if all the stories she’d read had any truth to them.

“So we’re in accord, then? We retake Erebor?” Bane asked the room at large.

One by one, all around the room, they agreed. The walls rang with ‘ayes’ and sibilant ‘yeses’ resounded. Until Bane rounded on Bilbo. 

“Seems to me, you rather assumed my involvement.” Bilbo looked displeased.

Lauren looked at her, confusion painted in broad strokes across her face. “Why would you not come?”

“I think I rather had enough of dwarves the first time around. Never mind that not a one of you appreciated me. I’m looking at you, Thorin Oakenshield. Well, Lauren Durin, I suppose,” she equivocated. “So tell me, why should I agree to go with you? Do you understand what you’re asking of me? What you want me to give up?” 

Lauren emerged from the corner from which she had presided over the proceedings and walked toward the chair in which Bilbo was enthroned. She knelt in front of it, looking her in the eye. “Because, Bilbo, I promise…” she paused. “Well, actually…” Placing a hand on the arm of the chair, she levered herself up and turned to face the room, commanding everyone’s attention. “All of you: I cannot promise we won’t be in danger.” Her voice was deep and powerful, conjuring up thoughts of a speech just before battle. “I cannot promise that the peril of this quest won’t equal the peril of the last. But I can promise that I will lead you better, and I can promise that we are wiser, and I can promise that I will do my best to ensure that everyone in this room is still with us at the end of our journey.” She paused, awkwardly, the spell she had cast over the room suddenly falling, and she was no longer the mighty and ancient king of the dwarves, ruler of Erebor, holder of the Arkenstone, but instead just a secretary in a living room, making a grand speech to the most mixed room anyone could imagine. She looked around and cleared her throat. “Metaphorical journey, that is. I don’t anticipate having to go too terribly far, seeing as Erebor is within the city.” 

Her words were punctuated by a clap of thunder and a sound like the sky falling down onto the roof of Bilbo’s flat. It seemed to dissolve whatever cords had held the company there, and they began to stand, shuffling around. Some stretched, others looked about to gather their things. Filip and Kieran, as if by rote, gathered their mugs of tea and delivered them to the kitchen sink. 

“So that’s it then? It’s decided?” Bilbo asked, looking around.

“We will go, Miss Baggins. Whether you join us or not is entirely up to you. Good night.” Bane nodded respectfully at her, and then pulled her coat back on. She stepped confidently into the stairwell and descended from view. Lauren met Bilbo’s gaze, but her face was unreadable; after a few seconds of tense, sustained eye contact, Lauren turned away, calling Filip and Kieran to her. They gathered their things and were out the door before Bilbo could think to call out a farewell. 

The rest of the party followed suit; a couple here, a trio there, and they drifted out, each politely putting their dishes in the kitchen sink and tidying up what they had mussed. Bilbo stood, hurriedly, remembering her duty as hostess; she offered to call cabs, helped sort out the mess at the coatrack. Slowly, each group trooped down the stairs and out the door, followed by Bilbo. Every group that departed, she offered flimsy formal goodbyes, entirely at odds with the subject of their strange visit.

She saw the last group of her unexpected guests out, and shut the door behind them. She sunk back against it, staring at the base of the stairs. Eyes closed, she dropped her head back, allowing her mind to fall fallow for just a moment. Unbidden, images sprang into her mind’s eye: a grass covered hill, circular door in the center; a forest of pines, all ablaze; a dragon, mighty and dangerous; a town built on stilts over a lake; a group of men gathered around a campfire, laughing at a joke that wasn’t even funny, just for the chance to laugh. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she heaved herself up, using the banister for support. Apparently, she had a decision to make. Really, it was just nice not to have to play host to a small horde of dwarves overnight this time around. 

When she rounded the doorframe and looked upon the remains of the chaos that her flat (and indeed her life) had become, something in her just gave up. She staunchly ignored all of it; every bit of it went unnoticed and un-dealt with. Instead, she pulled the book she had recently started off its shelf and plopped down into her coziest armchair. The rest of the world could wait; she’d had quite enough of real life for the day, thank you, and she’d be escaping to a fictional world for a bit. All worldly cares and decisions could come back later, she wasn’t taking visitors just now.

Unfortunately, her mind had other ideas. She would read a sentence, then the next one, and the third would reference something the first sentence had explained but she hadn’t remembered. So she’d set about reading the same section again, to the same end. Relentless, she stubbornly forged her way through, a paragraph at a time. She refused to allow her thoughts to wander to dwarves, or women with magnificent eyes that never seemed to smile, or grinning boys who couldn’t say her name properly (or perhaps just never tried). She certainly wasn’t going to think of angular tattoos spanning the breadth of an arm that was easily the size of her thigh, and that was not small. No thought of a mountain that seemed to scrape the sky, or giants that sprung from stone, or strange creatures from deep within the heart of a subterranean lake. 

Bilbo jumped, startled by the pounding on her door, and accidentally slammed her book shut. It didn’t make much difference, she couldn’t concentrate anyway. She hadn’t turned the page in at least half an hour. Annoyed at the interruption (though it hadn’t actually interrupted anything), she flung open the door with bravado she didn’t feel, only to be faced with a dripping wet Lauren, breathing heavily.

“It’s gone bloody three in the morning, what are you doing back here?” she asked scoldingly. 

Lauren took a deep breath, started to speak, then stopped herself. She finally stuttered out, “I keep having these… dreams. Ever since I remembered, and even before. Only they’re more vivid than any dream I’ve ever had. And it’s you and me doing things we’ve never done, not here and not then either. In bed,” here, she at least had the good breeding to look embarrassed, “And other times, as well. And I wake up, wanting you, but it’s not just lust, it’s something more and deeper and so real I can taste it. And I wanted you then and I want you now, and I wonder if anyone’s ever touched you like that, here and now, and I hope so, because I want you to be happy, but at the same time, I’m irrationally jealous of them.”

For a time the only sound was rainwater dripping from her clothes, and Bilbo just stared at her, face unreadable. Floundering, Lauren continued, “And I know I wasn’t the best, last time, because I never even tried, before, but I wish I had, I wish we were then what we could have been, and I know I’m rubbish at apologies-“

“Among other things,” Bilbo interrupted.

“-But I can’t sleep for thinking about you, about everything I should have done, or not done. And I want to make you see how much of that I regret, all the things we could have been but we weren’t. I don’t deserve it, but I _want_ the chance to do it over again, to treat you like I should’ve treated you before, to actually fucking think, for God’s sake, and to make up for not making amends until it was too late…” she paused and took a deep breath, composing herself. “But if you would rather not, if you hate me on sight for what I did to you - before, which you have every right to do, I will respect that and keep our relationship totally professional.” Lauren seemed to have run out of whatever had driven her to this confession, wilting as her strange speech wound down, still dripping wet on Bilbo’s doorstep. 

Bilbo evaluated her, looking her up and down before speaking. They hadn’t even moved inside, but then, Lauren hadn’t really given her time. She sighed, and then said, “Thorin bloody Oakenshield was a right bastard.” The pause was long enough to make Lauren despair of ever redeeming herself. As she was on the point of turning away, apologizing profusely, Bilbo continued, “but maybe Lauren Durin is a little better.”

~

Lauren was settled at the table with a cup of tea and a towel around her, and still managed somehow to seem like she belonged there more than Bilbo did, and held herself like a queen to boot. Something about it seemed very unfair to Bilbo, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. 

Bilbo cradled her own cup of tea. It kept her hands from fidgeting and the steam smelled wonderful. The silence stretched out, second by second. 

Lauren sipped her tea. Bilbo followed suit, having momentarily forgotten about her own drink. They continued to sit in silence. It seemed Lauren had exhausted her store of words, at least for the moment. Slowly they sipped their tea, one after the other, the only sound the clink of ceramic dishes and the drip of rainwater onto Bilbo’s kitchen floor. The silence held, cemented by the lateness of the hour. Bilbo should have been in bed hours ago; she debated absently whether she should simply close the shop tomorrow and have a much-deserved rest. Bilbo lifted her cup to her lips again, out of habit, and was surprised to find that it was empty. 

Lauren must have found the same; only a few moments later, she asked, “Will you join us?” Her voice was strangely loud, harsh against the silence that had reigned for so long. Still, Bilbo didn’t find it jarring. Very little that Lauren Durin did was jarring; she was like Thorin that way. Bilbo chuckled, reminding herself that Lauren had better be like Thorin in more than just that, if they had any hope of this venture succeeding. She called herself back to the moment, remembering that she’d been asked a question, and responded quite honestly, 

“I don’t know.”

Lauren seemed taken aback at this, but did not betray it; Bilbo thought that perhaps the only reason she could tell was that Lauren’s expressions were so like Thorin’s. 

Words tinged with sarcasm, she asked, “Do you plan to decide before or after we are all reincarnated the next time?” Ah, there it was. The sheer attitude that Thorin exuded, the… well, the only word for it was sass. That was the leader Bilbo knew, for all the majestic posturing and grand speeches. This was Thorin.

“Well, I had considered both options, and all told, I might just wait until the fourth time around, I think,” Bilbo informed her, giving as good as she got.

Lauren set her cup down with some force, causing Bilbo to narrow her eyes in annoyance. That was her mother’s china, after all. No cause to get violent with it, the cup hadn’t done anything to offend. 

Taking pity on Lauren’s frustration, for no other reason than the safety of her mother’s china, Bilbo offered, “I am thinking on it. I simply want to be sure that my choice is the right one.” She conveniently avoided confessing that her intent had been to simply ignore the problem until a solution presented itself, thinking it might sour the negotiations a bit. Lauren seemed disinclined to reply, or so Bilbo thought; that was, until her head drooped, and she jerked back up again, cheeks coloring. Bilbo couldn’t help but take pity on her, pretentious though she could be.

“Come on, then. You can sleep here tonight. If you go back out there, you’re nearly guaranteed to catch your death of pneumonia.” So saying, she pushed away from the table and stood. She thought about gathering their dishes but wrote it off as a hopeless case; there was just too much mess for it to matter. Rounding the table to stand in front of Lauren, she offered her hand. “Up you get.”

Lauren’s face was conflicted; she bit her lip, casting a glance at the clock, and then back at Bilbo. “If you insist,” she finally acquiesced. “Far be it from me to resist the orders of our burglar.”

“Not yours yet,” Bilbo chided playfully, and then realizing the potential double entendre, corrected, “Your burglar. Not your burglar, yet.” She shooed Lauren towards her bedroom, turning the bed down for her and thanking her lucky stars she was naturally neat, bordering on compulsive. No underwear or dirty clothes were strewn about her room, and it couldn’t have been more than a few days since she’d washed her sheets.

“If you need anything, I’ll just be in the kitchen,” Bilbo told her.

“But where will you sleep?” Lauren asked, as though it had just occurred to her. Perhaps it had; she looked ready to drop, and certainly not fit for doing much critical thinking.

“I don’t anticipate getting much sleep tonight, don’t you worry. Do you need to be up a certain time?”

“What day is tomorrow?” Lauren asked, already facedown in bed.

“Today; today is Saturday.” 

“Then no,” she replied, after a moment of deliberation. “My nephews are old enough to watch out for themselves…” and there the rest of the sentence trailed off into garbled words that she couldn’t even begin to interpret.

Bilbo shook her head fondly at Lauren’s rapid descent into gibberish, and then caught herself. What right did she have to do anything fondly when it came to Lauren Durin? They were entirely different sorts of people. It was only through the strangest sequence of events that they’d ever even met each other. She remembered the news coverage surrounding her parents’ deaths. It had been tragic, and at the time she had mourned for the two girls, orphaned so recently after their brother’s death. But this woman was older than she was by a few years, though it seemed many more, and she was a near stranger, not to mention she had been grieving for twenty years and raising her nephews for nearly that long. She didn’t need Bilbo’s pity or fondness. Even if they had shared a past life, this woman was more trouble than anything, and seemed determined to drag Bilbo with her. Lauren had drifted off; this time, Bilbo simply pulled her shoes off and tucked her into bed. 

~

Half an hour later, Bilbo was still sitting at the kitchen table, deliberating. Surely this decision shouldn’t be so hard? The path seemed laid out before her. And yet she felt she had to give it the weight it deserved; all of their lives could hang in the balance. In fact, there was nothing to say that they couldn’t make a worse mess of it all this time than they had the last, if that were possible. Time seemed to drag on, and instead of focusing on the task at hand, she would get distracted, exhaustion getting the best of her, and hardly realize she was following a tangent of thought until it had been twenty minutes and fifteen topics, none of which were relevant. Finally, she seized herself.

_Bilbo_ , she told herself sternly, _you’ve got a choice to make._ After all, there’s not much point in being reincarnated all at the same time if you can’t reassemble the team because one of them refuses to come. Or perhaps that was the choice, the one choice that should have been made the last time but wasn’t. Perhaps last time Bilbo had been a silly, adventure-hungry fool, and by joining their quest he had doomed them. Surely she hadn’t single-handedly ended the line of Durin? So there was the potential to save lives as well as to mess up more profoundly and probably kill a few extra people along the way, not to mention the empire that hung in the balance.

So, when Lauren woke up, did Bilbo send her on her way alone, or did she go with her, to weather the journey by her side? Either way, she couldn’t go back to who she had been; now she had all these memories, and everyday life could never hold the same appeal. What is peace and contentment in the face of dragons, trolls, treasure, the stuff of fantasy? Who chooses a quiet old bookstore over a once in a lifetime adventure? She would never be content again, that much was certain. But then, what _would_ she be, assuming she survived this madness? 

This decision would make or break the Company, and what was the point of having lived the entire damnable adventure before, if it wasn’t going to be helpful for this most important of choices? Blast wizards and their meddling ways. Gandalf, or Garrett, rather, had been so insistent she join them. To what end? For decision making, all this knowledge was useless; how was she to pinpoint the flutter of a butterfly’s wings that created the hurricane that destroyed them? 

But then, Filip and Kieran’s faces at her door - the way they had looked at her, not like a stranger being met for the first time, but like coming home. Like a friend that’s been long absent, and you’ve been anxiously missing them, but now all that has passed. The way Lauren seemed to sigh when she looked at her Company, letting slip the tension she carried, gaining the bearing of a queen, regal and wise. The myriad of times she, Bilbo Baggins of the Shire, simple hobbit though she had been, was the difference between life and death for one of her companions. Could she stomach not being there for them this time around? Would she spend her days awaiting the first phone call, to tell her someone had died, and wonder if she could have prevented it? Who would it be? Young Orie, shy and strong and clumsy? Or Bill, back unguarded for half a moment, and that was all it took? Maybe Kieran, caught laughing, face forever frozen in a terrifying rictus of a grimace to mock his ever-present smile? Which image would torment her for the rest of her life? 

There was no guarantee of success, she told herself. And yet, there had been no guarantee of success the last time, either, but she had gone nonetheless. But _why_? The allure of an adventure, like one of her stories? Bilbo cast her mind back to all the times she had wanted to be that brave, that strong, the times she had wished she would be called upon as an epic hero, to lead a righteous charge into the fray against an evil foe. How many heroines had she imagined wearing her face? Well, here was that call, turning up on her doorstep. All that was left was to heed it. 

Absently, she fingered the thick paper of Garrett’s letter, still shoved into her pocket. She knew what he advised. Her own mind was so damned muddled, though! Well, perhaps not so much her mind as her heart. Her mind knew exactly what was logical, and that was to stay right where she was, safe and content. Her heart, though…

Somewhere, distantly in her head, she heard her mother’s voice, just as every time she had a difficult decision to make. Chocolate or strawberry? Red or pink? Straight or curly?

“Bilbo, darling, flip a coin; when you see how it lands, you’ll know what you really want, because you’ll either be relieved or wish it had landed the other way.” 

 She stood resolutely, and marched across her kitchen to the junk drawer. It took some digging, but she finally located a single penny. Marching back over to the table, she balanced it on her thumbnail and took a deep, preparatory breath. _Heads, I go; tails, I stay._ And with that, she flipped it up into the air and slammed it down onto the table. When it made a sharp bang, she winced, only just then remembering the sleeping Lauren in the next room. She waited, listening for the sounds of someone rudely awakened, but heard nothing. Relaxing, she slowly lifted her hand, peeking under it. 

Tails.

Bilbo thought she’d feel serene, relieved; here her question was answered, debate over. Except… except she just felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. A bit of an ache in her chest, too.

And just like that, it was obvious what she really wanted all along.

It looked like she was going on an adventure.

Lost in thought, Bilbo didn’t register the phone ringing until the third or fourth trill. She jumped up to answer it, wondering with concern who would be calling at that predawn hour. She lifted the phone from its place and answered, “Hello?”

“Bilbo! Grab what you need and get out now. They’re coming for you. They’ll kill you, I’m sure of it.”

Bilbo pulled the phone away from her face and looked at it as though it would answer for the strange conversation it was relaying. “Who is this? Who is coming? What are you talking about?”

“It’s Bane. No time to explain. Take only necessities and leave as soon as possible.” Bilbo heard a faint click, and then a dial tone. She slowly placed the phone back into the receiver, gaze distant, and then snapped into action. 

“LAUREN!” she bellowed as she ran to her hall closet, pulling out a bag. “Wake up!” Rubbing her eyes, Lauren emerged from the bedroom, one shoe on and the other in her hand, purse slung over her shoulder. “Go check on the boys. Something’s terribly wrong, Bane’s just called. Make sure they’re alright? I’ll call when I’m somewhere safe.” Bilbo turned and started towards her bedroom.

Lauren stared at her blankly for a second, then paled, rushing over to grab Bilbo by the shoulders and force her to look her in the eye. “What did she say? Mahal, are they hurt? What were her exact words?” 

“Oh, Lauren, no, as far as I know, they’re fine, but they should be warned. Apparently someone is threatening my life, there’s nothing to say they wouldn’t do they same to Filip or Kieran.”

Lauren darted out the doorway and down the stairs. She paused only for a fraction of a second in the middle of the stairwell to look at Bilbo, eyes searching her face. Then she was gone, leaving behind only a gust of cold wet night air. 

Bilbo froze, for just a moment, feeling strangely alone and bereft, and also wondering who in the blazes Mahal was, but then sprang back into action. She snatched her phone and the charger from the wall, tossed them into her purse; this and that piece of clothing, the most important toiletries, a journal and pens because who goes on a journey without them, and a few other sundry knickknacks made their way into the backpack. She threw on a few extra layers: a cardigan, wool socks, a scarf, her proper coat she pulled on before swinging the backpack over her shoulders, slapping a hat on her head. Turning out lights, she made her way to the door that led downstairs. Her hand was hovering over the last light switch, and she cast one last glance over her flat. The sink was piled with dirty dishes, papers were spread all over creation, the living room was strewn with pillows and peppered with chairs she didn’t even know she owned dragged in from who-knows-where, her bedroom covered in everything she had pulled out but decided not to pack or yanked out of a drawer in search of something else. Then she shook herself and jogged down the stairs, locking the door behind her. 

_~_

Eventually, she slowed to a walk, then barely a stroll, aimless and wandering.She didn’t stop walking until she was nearly twenty blocks from her home, farther than she’d ever had reason to go on foot. She had passed every familiar landmark she usually used to navigate, and was just, sort of… totally lost. It was getting cold, the late autumn chill bearable for short walks, but not the sort of weather you enjoy being out in, and certainly not in the rain. A convulsive shiver ran through her and she adjusted the pack on her back. Looking around her, she thought desperately, _what do I do next?_ Who could she trust? She had no way of contacting any of her newly-resurrected friends. 

Another bout of shivers ran through her, so strong they rattled her teeth. She sighed and resigned herself (a bit melodramatically) to dying of hypothermia, when she caught sight of a tiny cafe that boasted the best bread in the city. She laughed, thinking of what Barbara would have to say about that, and that became sardonic laughter at her own slow-wittedness. Numb fingers clumsily pulled out her cell phone, thankfully well-charged, and dialed a number she hadn’t had reason to recall in a very long time. 

“‘Lo?” A drowsy voice answered.

“Beau, thank goodness. I know that I’ve no right to ask a thing of you, but… I don’t suppose you’ve a couch I could sleep on for the night? Or rather, what remains of it? I hate terribly to bother you, especially this late - ” 

“Psssh. You’re always welcome here, you know that. Are you alright? Where are you? Do I need to come get you or sh’ll I call you a taxi?”

“I’m fine. At least for the time being. And though I hate to be an imposition, I don’t see summoning a taxi with any success in this neighborhood, at this time of night. I rather forgot to take my bike with me when I fled.”

“You’re no bother, Bilbo. I’ll just come fetch you. If that’s alright?”

“More than. Thank you so much. I’ll explain everything when you get here.” She gave him the first nearby address she could find. It wasn’t like there was much traffic this early in the morning; she wouldn’t miss his van pull up. 

“Alright darlin’. I’ll be there as soon as humanly possible.”

The thing was, she absolutely did not doubt that he would. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this, come find me on tumblr; I’m unintentionalgenius. 
> 
> I've promised myself I won't post anything that doesn't have at least two chapters in front of it written, so posting may be a bit spotty, but I'm committed to finishing this. Let me know if there's anything behind the scenes or backstory-wise you'd like to see; when I can't stand to write this monster, I play around in this universe with drabbles and the like. 
> 
> As always, don't hesitate to comment or message me, here or on tumblr. I love feedback. It gives me life.


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